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The City We Became is an absorbing, wonderful and troubling book. It is written with all the skill and poetry that I've come to expect from N.K. Jemisin, and I am grateful for it. At the same time, it has to be one of the angriest novels I have read for quite some time; the fury burns through the pages. And in the end, as much as I have strong personal issues with Staten Island (for a variety of reasons, including local political ones that I won't go into here), I've had relatives there and have visited its nature preserves, and so ended the book feeling sorry for the isolation of the borough and its avatar. Perhaps I was supposed to. I'm not sure, and that could be a reflection of either the skill of the author or of my own background. Or both.

A very skillful updating of Nesbit's Five Children and It. Saunders obviously knows and loves Nesbit's writing, and although the prose (quite naturally) had more modern nuances to it, especially as the book progressed -- and although the storyline was fairly predictable -- that didn't matter. I was very impressed, enjoyed it thoroughly, and am very glad she wrote it. I'd recommend it to any adult Nesbit fans.

I am a great fan of Jeffrey Ford's work, and a great fan of this novel. As a native New Yorker, I am fascinated by well-researched fiction that investigates the city's past, and as a speculative fiction reader, I love well-written fantasies. This is both. It incorporates fictional characters (as can be surmised by the title) into an imagining of NYC in the 1850s, keeps a wonderfully exciting pace, and is very unpredictable. I'm very glad I read it (finally; it's been on my shelf for a while), and am happy to recommend it.

An excellent dystopian novel with fascinating, individualized characters and a satisfactory ending (while avoiding the "happy ever after" syndrome). Its concession to the humanity of all its characters while firmly emphasizing the unfairness of its (and not incidentally our) society is refreshing.

I just sped through all four books of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries, and I enjoyed them immensely. It isn't often these days that I can find a series that I can completely lose myself in, that has both a great plot, great characters, and humor. There is a lot of wonderful, serious genre literature out there today, but sometimes you need a book that lets you escape, but escape with flair, and this is one of them. Murderbot is one of the most interesting cyborgs I've ever met; I hope to be able to follow its adventures again sometime.

It's been too long since I've been addicted to a series of books, so I'm really happy to have found the Murderbot series. My only regret is that I am now starting Exit Strategy, the last (so far) of the funny, occasionally poignant adventure series.

Excellent story

This isn't the first time this type of story has been written, certainly (see: James Tiptree Jr.'s "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?'" and Joanna Russ' "When It Changed" ), but it's an excellent example of the subgenre in which a culture that assumes it's superior is confronted by its assumptions. Which is only to be expected from N. K. Jemisin, whose writing never fails to impress.

This is a truly subversive book, picking out the science fiction/fantasy tropes of the chosen hero and the princess-in-peril, and twisting it in a weird, wonderful and completely unexpected way. I love the way the story kept changing in ways that I didn't expect, and then twisting again. And how the characters are human, fallible, but heroic. Recommended for readers who don't mind having their expectations blown up.

As with the first book in this series, The Collapsing Empire, this is a wonderfully written space opera with complex, human characters (who can also be a great deal of fun to read about) and a plot which pushes ahead briskly. I found it a little more predictable than the first book, and while the ending is very satisfactory, the surprise was not in who was going to win, but how they would go about it. Still, I hugely enjoyed the book, and am very much looking forward to the next.